All The President`s Lensmen: Access Is The Big Joy

The historian-as-flatterer staked out a point of view on a bright Maine morning.

David Valdez slowly twisted his camera`s lens, focusing on the president. He saw every tick, every emotion yet recorded a selective moment.

On this warm summer day, when President Bush was managing a diplomatic crisis in the Middle East -- and his vacation -- Valdez, the president`s personal photographer, faithfully trailed after him. On the golf course, at business meetings, and during a fishing expedition on the rough seas, Valdez shot almost 250 frames.

It is from so many mundane moments that myths are made. For while the public only gets a glimpse of Valdez`s work, what he and his predecessors have photographed has shaped the world`s perception of the now mythical modern American presidency.

Like the 16th century painter who elevated his royal patron through portraiture, Valdez, with his camera, seeks to capture a unique view of one of the most important men in the world. The president swings a golf club. Click. The president gazes off with a concerned squint. Click. The president smiles at his son. Click. The president smiles, he twists, he nods. Click. Click. Click.

But of the 250 frames Valdez will shoot this day, only two will be released to the media immediately. The rest will be filed for history to consider.

He does not shoot everything.

On this day, he did not photograph the president getting a relaxing pounding from a masseur. And he stayed for only a few moments of a 45-minute national security briefing.

``Sometimes you give up something to get something,`` he said, explaining a philosophy that has carried him through seven years with Bush. ``They don`t always want me there and it is by instinct that I walk away.``

The news photographers who work in the White House have nice things to say about Valdez. But, while they envy his access to what is important and what is revealing and what is interesting, they do not like the trade-offs, such as his lack of total control over his work. ``We`ll never see what he gets,`` one veteran photographer said, as he watched Valdez climb into the fourth golf cart behind the president. ``They don`t release the good stuff.``

Still, picture a dream photographer`s job and Valdez has it.

It may seem enviable, he said, but it is not so simple. He must fill as many roles as there are back roads to follow to Bush`s sprawling compound at Walker`s Point.

``I go in and approach every day as a historian,`` Valdez said. He spoke slowly, for it is rare for the discreet observer to be asked for his observations. ``At the same time, I can become a photojournalist or an ad man. I switch into those roles as they come into play.``

For close to 30 years, every president has given one, hand-picked photographer a chance to record history from the inside, leaving a rich pictorial record of the American presidency. Even President Carter, who disdained the position saying it smacked of an ``imperial`` office-holder, allowed a few staff photographers to shoot around him.

But much of the work of this select group is stashed in presidential libraries, which have filed hundreds of thousands of negatives that historians have yet to interpret. The men who chronicled the events talk about these collections as if they are treasures: They contain mystery and new information; they reveal the discomfiting mixture of public events and private emotions surrounding the president.

But no presidential photographer, thus far, has plumbed the images he shot for a public showing. Michael Evans, former President Reagan`s photographer, tried to explain why he thinks he will wait 10, 15 or more years before reviewing the 37,000 rolls of film he took in four years at the White House: ``I guess there`s a kind of loyalty that sets in after so many years. No matter how you felt when you left, you left with the idea of the importance of the office, and even when you`ve seen beyond the myths of the presidency, they live on inside you.``

David Hume Kennerly, President Ford`s personal photographer, wrote a book, an autobiography, not a pictorial work or the typical kiss-and-tell.

``I felt I was in a privileged position,`` Kennerly said of his time as a presidential photographer. ``It was a matter of integrity not to talk. But I think you`ll find most photographers like that. They`re too busy taking it all in.``

It is 7 a.m. and Bush and his son George have teed off at the first hole of Cape Arundel Country Club. The news photographers were left in the dew as Valdez sped off in the golfing caravan.

At the second hole, Valdez stayed close enough to hear Bush`s banter with his son but far enough away so that he had to use a long lens.

``The odd thing is I`m not much of a security risk,`` Valdez said. ``I tend not to listen. What was going through my mind is `Look at the light. Is that guy in my way? I hope I don`t knock something off a table.```